There’s a double-helping of Self served up in the States with the publication of Liver, which has a rather attractive front cover (you can buy it here), and the short story collection, The Undivided Self, both published by Bloomsbury USA.
Walking to Hollywood – some more reviews
The Guardian: “You see suddenly that, beneath the apocalyptic humour and fizzing contempt of Walking to Hollywood lies the iron will and cold, self-inspecting intelligence of its author. All along the book has been about death.”
The Spectator: “The conversations with Scooby-Doo, the made-up characters, the sex, lies and videotape – this is a landscape contoured, almost in whole, by Self’s imagination … It is, as always, a place crammed with a Devil’s Dictionary’s worth of wordplay, and with an unerring tendency towards the absurd and perverse … Walking to Hollywood is certainly an engaging enough breakdown on the part of its author. Just make sure to approach it with all the professional detachment of a psychiatrist.”
Scotland on Sunday: “The most successful book he has written, and it establishes, perhaps, what kind of writer Self actually is: a modern-day Jonathan Swift. He has the satirist’s interest in exaggeration, distortion, snarling anger and linguistic verve, but more seriously, he is serious. There is a deeply moral core to Walking To Hollywood, and a raw emotional quality his previous fictions may have repressed or sublimated.”
The Herald: “Walking To Hollywood is Self’s most interesting book in years, though the intensity of his imagination can at times be as exhausting as the epic walks he embarks upon … Who killed the movies? Self never collars the culprit. Perhaps because it was an assisted suicide, cinema helped towards the light by its apprentice, TV, the American long-form series, with its Sopranos effortlessly out-braining any recent multiplex movie. And out-braining, you fear, the majority of the current crop of social-realist novels. Outflanked by never-stronger TV on the one hand, and on the other, headlines you couldn’t make up, the novel has to find new routes – and Will Self is a pathfinder.”
Self on Self
Listen to Will Self and Martin Amis (and others) talking about putting themselves in their fiction from the Guardian Books podcast here.
Bookslam reading and interview
Listen to Will Self being interviewed after his appearance at Bookslam recently and also to him giving a reading from Walking to Hollywood.
Watch ‘Obsessed with Walking’
Watch some clips from the fascinating 30-minute Australian film Obsessed with Walking by Rosie Jones, which follows Will Self around Los Angeles “doing field research” for his book Walking to Hollywood and interviews him at home in London too.
To listen to the director talking about why and how she made the film, go here. For more information about the film, visit the Flaming Star Films website. To buy a copy of Obsessed with Walking go here.
“Will Self’s just flashed me …”
The Scotsman’s verdict on Walking to Hollywood: “There must be a word – I don’t know it but Will Self will – meaning envy of eloquence, jealousy of the ability to use a large vocabulary convincingly to make the reader’s mind bounce around different levels of reality. That’s one reason Self remains such an engaging writer: the other is that underneath even his weirdest imaginings lies the kind of truths that can only be absorbed through a pair of walking feet.”
For the full review, go here
Meanwhile, Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent, writes: “When you turn to page 225 of Will Self’s new book, Walking to Hollywood, you get a modest surprise – or perhaps that should be an immodest one. There, at the bottom of page 227, is a picture of a naked man. As in the Duchess of Argyll’s notorious Polaroids, the man is in effect headless as the picture has been taken in what looks like a bathroom mirror and the reflection crops him off just above the nipples. Unlike the Duchess of Argyll’s Polaroids, it is a sexually innocent image, the shadows in the shot concealing all anatomical detail. One arm hangs down beside the torso; the other is out of sight, presumably holding the camera with which this odd image has been taken. And what makes it particularly arresting is your reasonable assumption, as a reader, that this is a portrait of the author. “Will Self’s just flashed me,” you think, before you turn your attention back to his prose – which both demands and deserves it.” Read the rest of his article here.
Sutcliffe also discusses Self’s new book on Radio 4’s Saturday Review with, among others, Iain Sinclair. You can listen to it here.
Website exclusive: Foie Humain read by Will Self
Val Carmichael credited Pete Stenning — who was called ‘the Martian’ — with getting him off the gin and on to the vodka. “Cleaver cunt, the Martian,” Val said to the assembled members, who were grouped at the bar of the Plantation Club in their alloted positions …
Listen to Will Self read the start of Foie Humain here and then here, the first of his four part story-cycle in Liver, which is available as an unabridged audio book from Whole Story Audio Books for £19.99 here.
Devilish Business on the South Downs
A curious incident on the South Downs: driving my eldest son and his stuff down to his new rented accommodation in Brighton, prior to his second year at Sussex University, we pulled the van off the motorway and drove up towards Devil’s Dyke. I wanted to show Lex the Dyke, and also his youngest brother, Luther, who was along for the ride. My own father used to take me up here on the weekends we spent in Brighton at my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace, and he would always tell the folk tale about how the Dyke was dug by the Devil to flood the Sussex Weald, but that he was surprised in the middle of the night by an old woman cotter lighting her oil lamp, and taking it for the dawn he jumped all the way to the North Downs where he landed forming the Devil’s Punchbowl on impact.
I digress – although not without purpose, the Dyke also features in the book I’ve just published, Walking to Hollywood. What goes around … Anyway, instead of taking the spur to the Dyke car park in towards the golf club we found the road closed with a police barrier and a bored-looking WPC standing in front of it. “You can’t come this way,” she said when I’d wound down the window, “haven’t you heard about the body found on the golf course?” Well, no – but what none of us Londoners had heard of before was cops so keen to impart. In the Smoke they wouldn’t give you the time of day, but down here in Miss Marpleville we got all the dope: according to the WPC, said corpse was “badly charred” and – here her voice dropped to a conspiratorial undertone – “the feet had been chopped off”.
I suggested it might’ve been that most loathsome of crimes, an “honour killing”, but the WPC looked at me as if I were a fool. Maybe she thought it was the Devil what done it.
Walking to Hollywood, an early review
Walking to Hollywood, Will Self’s new book, is published by Bloomsbury today. One of the first reviews is from the Sunday Times, who said that it was “Casually delirious and unfailingly precise … the whole book is a painfully brilliant performance full of Self’s characteristic obsessions with scale, texture and metamorphosis. The overall effect is hallucinogenic, paranoid and almost gruellingly clever.”
There was an interview with Self in the Telegraph last week talking about the book, which can be found here.
Walking to Hollywood tour dates
Some forthcoming tour dates with Will Self talking about Walking to Hollywood:
September 7 at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham, West Sussex. Details here.
September 9 at the SW11 festival in London. Details here.
September 13 at Arnolfini, Bristol. Details here.
September 14 at Topping books in Bath. Details here.
September 17 at Cambridge Arts Centre. Details here.
October 4 at Clapham Bookshop, 7pm. More details here.
October 11, Ilkley literature festival. Details here.
October 8 at the Oxford Play House “reading selections from his latest novel, Walking to Hollywood, a fictionalised memoir of some of his own more extreme urban peregrinations, including a week-long circumambulation of Los Angeles. Self will also be discussing the death of film, the industrialisation of urban space and the virtualisation of the human psyche – although not necessarily in that order!” More details here.
October 12 at the Morley literature festival. Details here.
October 24 at the Hackney Dissenting Academy with Iain Sinclair. Details here.
November 4 Gloucester Guildhall, details here.
January 24 at Komedia in Brighton. Details here.
More to follow …
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